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What's a Link? What's a URL?

I've been helping my mother set up a website for the business she started recently. I gave here a straightforward drupal setup, with TinyMCE for some WYSIWYG HTML authoring.

That's obviously not enough though. If she's going to make her own content, she needs to at least understand the basics. Here's an email I sent her on the topic of why the content she created isn't available anywhere, while some of it is. (there are no links to it.)

Maybe it'll help someone else as well.

Think of it this way:

Your website is made up of pages (node 13 is a page)
The pages are like the houses in a town.

When you created that page, you built the house, but there are no roads leading to it. No one can get there.

The news articles page I created for you, is kind of like a cul de sac. Any time you build one of those, they automatically get stuck on that street, and people see them pop up.

Make sense?

So, links are roads. They let users of your site get to the pages you've created.

On all your news articles, you created a link at the bottom, those links lead to the journal advocate's site. This would be just like those, except it would probably lead from this page:
http://familyrc.net/node/7
to this page:
http://familyrc.net/node/13

Now, addresses. Let me throw out that earlier analogy, but use a similar one. ok?

web addresses like:
http://familyrc.net/node/7
are pointers to a very specific, single thing out on the web.

Just like:
"303 Elwood, Sterling CO, USA"
is a pointer to a very specific, single thing on our planet.

so, to make that similar to a web address, it'd be like this:

http://USA/Colorado/Sterling/Elwood St/303

Now. If you're standing in Sterling, and you are telling someone else in Sterling where you live, what all would you tell them?

http://USA/Colorado/Sterling/Elwood St/303
?
or just:
Elwood St/303

What about telling someone who lives on your street?

303, right?

Web addresses are the same way. If you want to link to something on your website, you could do it relative to the site you're on.

So a link that resides on familyrc.net, to "http://familyrc.net/node/13" can be specified as: "/node/13" (the slashes are important)

Whereas, a link from familyrc.net to "http://www.journal-advocate.com/articles/2007/05/03/opinion/editorials/edit1.txt" Would need to be specified in its entirety. (it's in a whole other country! ;)